Executing a Global Sourcing Strategy
Global sourcing is a challenge with many opportunities to fail. Despite those challenges, procurement professionals succeed because they know how to handle all of the situations involving coordinating logistics, dealing with customs, arranging payment, identifying countries for sourcing, finding suppliers, calculating landed cost, assessing risks, and implementing their global contracts. Executing A Global Sourcing Strategy will teach you how to take global sourcing from a concept to a successful reality. Upon completing this course, you will be able to:
- Apply strategy for selecting products, countries, and potential suppliers for your first global sourcing initiative
- Determine global shipment quantities and frequencies
- Ensure smooth customs clearance
- Understand how the various duties, taxes, and fees affect total cost of ownership
- Apply 13 Incoterms to properly allocate the costs and risks of global shipments
- Understand how you may be impacted by the large number of regulations affecting shipments to the United States
- Understand the advantages and disadvantages of the channels for your global sourcing effort, including international procurement offices, supplier’s subsidiaries, and representatives, third-party IPOs, and direct ordering
- Understand the various global payment methods such as letters of credit, wire transfer, and supplier credit
- Apply eight steps for evaluating prospective global suppliers
- Understand terrorism issues related to global supply chain management
- Apply a landed cost model and integrate risk analysis techniques into your global sourcing strategy
This course is most effective if taken in conjunction with Basics of Smart International Procurement, which covers the fundamentals of preparing to buy globally including understanding differences in culture, communications, laws, currencies, and more.
This is a self-paced course with no instructor-led forum and you have 60 days from registration to complete all course elements. It should take you approximately 8 hours to review the material and take any quizzes. All readings are provided in the course.
This course has been pre-approved for 8 CEHs.
Profitable Inventory Management and Control
Bad inventory decisions can kill an organization’s profitability, whittle away at its market share, and generally wreak havoc on the supply chain. If you’re basing your inventory decisions on guesses or informally-learned tactics rather than basing them on time-tested best practices, you are probably setting yourself up for failure. Profitable Inventory Management and Control will give you the skills you need to use inventory as a strategic weapon for boosting profitability and giving your organization a competitive advantage. Upon completing this course, you will be able to:
- Identify the six big inventory risks and how to mitigate them
- Forecast more accurately whether your business is stable, growing, declining, or subject to seasonality
- Set up the inventory replenishment cycle, including setting safety stock levels, reorder points, and economic order quantities (EOQ)
- Measure inventory management performance using metrics such as inventory turnover, fill rate, and various financial ratios
- Integrate desired service levels into inventory management and control decisions
- Conduct inventory analysis, including applying ABC Analysis/Stratification
- Reduce inventory and calculate cost savings related to inventory management and control decisions
- Evaluate the effect of lead time, including transportation considerations, on inventory
- Understand what postponement is and how you might apply it for reducing inventory and waste
- Understand what inventory optimization really is and how you can harness it through technology
This is a self-paced course with no instructor-led forum and you have 60 days from registration to complete all course elements. It should take you approximately 8 hours to review the material and take any quizzes. All readings are provided in the course.
This course has been pre-approved for 8 CEHs.
Supply Management Contract Writing
Today, procurement professionals are doing less order processing and more contracting and relationship building with suppliers. This new role requires that you have a new skill set—contract writing. Yet most procurement professionals don’t know how to write a contract. This is troublesome. If you aren’t familiar with the advanced techniques of contract writing, you can put your organization at risk and be committed to a poor performing supplier for years.
The bottom line is that you need world-class contract writing skills to be successful in procurement in the 21st century. Our highly personal and interactive online course Supply Management Contract Writing will give you the skills necessary to minimize your procurement risks. This course goes way beyond the typical, dry explanations of contract law. Through examples, interactive exercises, and a sample contract, you will learn how to negotiate and write effective contracts and iron-clad terms and conditions. Upon completing this course, you will be able to:
- Protect your organization from the disastrous effects of suppliers’ failure to perform
- Identify if you need the protection of a contract
- Identify the most appropriate form of agreement
- Structure contracts
- Select, use, and develop language for methods of dispute resolution
- Write a contract’s key legal provisions such as indemnities and limits of liability
- Write a contract’s key commercial provisions such as pricing and delivery
- Write a contract’s key technical provisions such as specifications and warranties
- Understand how to make use of effective styles of contract writing
- Effectively proofread and organize contract revisions
This is a self-paced course with no instructor-led forum and you have 60 days from registration to complete all course elements. It should take you approximately 8 hours to review the material and take any quizzes. All readings are provided in the course.
This course has been pre-approved for 8 CEHs.
Powerful Negotiation for Successful Buying
Most savvy sellers go through negotiation training yearly. Unless you’ve been just as diligent at improving your procurement negotiation skills, your chances of getting the best deals from your suppliers are slim. Unfortunately, many procurement professionals feel that their past negotiation experience will serve them well today. However, sellers have figured out how to thwart yesterday’s procurement negotiation tactics. And much has changed. But you can quickly get the modern procurement negotiation strategies and skills you need to get the best deals in today’s environment. Our highly personal and interactive online course Powerful Negotiation for Successful Buying will teach you the latest and greatest procurement negotiation strategies so that even the savviest will give you the best deals possible. Upon completing this course, you will be able to:
- Apply the 10 essential steps of preparing for a negotiation
- Apply seven strategies on which to base a negotiation
- Prevent the disasters common to team negotiations
- Understand the unique things to consider in international negotiations
- Understand when negotiating by email is smart and when it is the most foolish thing a procurement professional can do
- Understand how to persuade a sole source supplier
- Apply the negotiation secret suppliers don’t want you to know
- Apply the persuasive concept that great marketers and salespeople use, but procurement professionals don’t use often enough
- Apply the one negotiation technique that is difficult for even the best sales negotiators to overcome
- Understand exactly what to say in 18 common negotiation situations
- Identify four common supplier tactics and how to neutralize them
- Identify seven mistakes most procurement professionals don’t realize that they make and how to avoid them
- Understand how to close a negotiation with big results using respectful pressure
- Apply six ways to continually improve your negotiating abilities
This is a self-paced course with no instructor-led forum and you have 60 days from registration to complete all course elements. It should take you approximately 8 hours to review the material and take any quizzes. All readings are provided in the course.
This course has been pre-approved for 8 CEHs.
14 Procurement Best Practices
Quickly and significantly improving your procurement department’s performance is not wishful thinking. With the right guidance and step-by-step instruction, you will soon be implementing the same procurement practices that are used by the world’s top corporations.
Our highly personal and interactive online course, 14 Procurement Best Practices, makes it realistic for you to quickly and significantly improve your performance and the performance of your procurement department. You’ll become a respected procurement leader by following this course’s step-by-step instructions, examples, and exercises, as well as the sample tools and worksheets that are included with your registration. Upon completing this course, you will be able to:
- Strategically measure purchasing performance
- Improve your spend management by implementing a buying plan
- Identify and select the best suppliers by using cross-functional commodity teams, scorecards, and total cost of ownership analysis
- Improve vendor performance through a supplier performance management program
- Optimize supplier relationships
- Improve risk management
- Map and improve processes
- Leverage technology such as eProcurement and Internet Reverse Auctions
- Conduct benchmarking
- Achieve efficiency through the systemization of purchasing operations
- Utilize a strategic plan
This is a self-paced course with no instructor-led forum and you have 60 days from registration to complete all course elements. It should take you approximately 8 hours to review the material and take any quizzes. All readings are provided in the course.
This course has been pre-approved for 8 CEHs.
Professional Procurement Project Management
Being able to consistently lead procurement projects to successful conclusions involves learning and applying proven procurement project management principles. Professional Procurement Project Management will teach you everything you need to learn to successfully manage modern procurement projects. Upon completing this course, you will be able to:
- Identify and execute the five phases of projects
- Create a project charter that will properly set management’s expectations
- Create standard project documents like work breakdown structures and Gantt charts that help to keep your projects on track
- Create network diagrams that will reveal realistic timelines for your projects
- Identify the critical path of projects in order to know where the biggest risks for project delay lie
- Identify the most significant risks facing your project
- Develop a risk plan and apply the four risk responses that are available to you
- Use project management software to make project monitoring easier, more accurate, and less time consuming
- Apply four tactics for accelerating a project
- Use the proper terminology and apply the techniques used by experienced and certified project managers
- Report project progress to management
- Understand what “scope creep” is and how to avoid it
This is a self-paced course with no instructor-led forum and you have 60 days from registration to complete all course elements. It should take you approximately 8 hours to review the material and take any quizzes. All readings are provided in the course.
This course has been pre-approved for 8 CEHs.
